(^16) Harold Bloom
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.
“Truce,” the original word in the first line, is more accurate than
“pact,” because truly there was a failure in commerce between Whitman and
Pound. Whether Pound remembered that Whitman’s father was a carpenter,
and that Whitman himself had worked, with his father, at the trade, is
beyond surmise. The root, as Pound perhaps knew, was Emerson. It is no
accident that Whitman and Emerson return to Pound together in The Pisan
Cantos, with Whitman central in the eighty-second and Emerson in the
eighty-third of the Cantos. Emerson, I think, returns in his own trope of self-
identification, the Transparent Eyeball, yet in Pound’s voice, since Emerson
was at most Pound’s American grandfather. But Whitman returns in
Whitman’s own voice, and even in his own image of voice, the “tally,”
because the obstinate old father’s voice remains strong enough to insist upon
itself:
“Fvy! in Tdaenmarck efen dh’ beasantz gnow him,”
meaning Whitman, exotic, still suspect
four miles from Camden
“O troubled reflection
“O Throat, O throbbing heart”
How drawn, O GEA TERRA,
what draws as thou drawest
till one sink into thee by an arm’s width
embracing thee. Drawest,
truly thou drawest.
Wisdom lies next thee,
simply, past metaphor.
Where I lie let the thyme rise ...
...................
fluid CQONOS, strong as the undertow
of the wave receding
but that a man should live in that further terror, and live
the loneliness of death came upon me
(at 3 P.M., for an instant) dakru◊wn
e...nteuÚqen